


A shiny new world

by Permenantlyexhaustedpigeon



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 10:35:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18497185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Permenantlyexhaustedpigeon/pseuds/Permenantlyexhaustedpigeon
Summary: Peter and Carol; the world ended and then it was put back together again and Aunt May wasn't dead. The cognitive  dissonance was enough to throw Peter off.Canon divergence, between Infinity War and End Game.





	A shiny new world

They're watching TV, quiet, exhausted and a few days into ... after. The world still feels brittle and fragile and easily broken and Peter finds himself checking things, a thousand times a day to see if they're still the same, still as he left them that day that never happened when the world broke. 

He's spending time at Stark Tower. All of them are. It's good to be around people who... anyway. Anyway. 

The new season of Queer Eye is on and there's some army lady getting made over for her wedding. Whatever. Peter is mostly not watching, because he's seen this episode before and well, the world breaks but you still have physics homework.

Carol is at one end of the long sectional couch, Valkyrie and Bruce at the other and Sam is reading over in one of the easy chairs where he plausible deniability over not watching TV. Peter's spider sense goes and he looks over at Carol and his heart sinks. She's sitting completely still with this like, weird look on her face, arms crossed around her stomach. You could never tell with old people. You thought they were cool and then you discovered that, well, they were weirdly upset over, like, Queer Eye which was completely full of what MJ called boring middle class mainstream heteronormative gays on an appeasement agenda. Ugh. 

Peter scooches down a little on the couch and closes his laptop and says "You know, gay people are like, normal now, right?" His heart is pounding so hard he's sure Carol can hear it. "They're like, allowed to be in the army and get married and have kids and stuff. I know you're super old and you haven't been on Earth since forever but you totally have to like, adjust to it and not just because like, Sam and Steve are together but because it's completely freaking normal." He's stood up without realising and Carol is blinking at him.

Peter takes a deep breath. He is ready to fite her over this. Carol is -- she looks at him funny. "Since when?" Her voice is kind of strangled and yeah, her hands are glowing. “Since when?”

Peter's spider sense is flaring now and he will fite her. He will. "I don't know. Since I was like, in elementary school."

"2011," Sam says, real soft. "Before I got out, even."

"Jesus," Carol whispers. 

"Yeah, so you can't --" 

Bruce cuts him off with a sharp "Peter!" and Peter turns to look at Bruce now, still ready to fite someone. Preferably an old person. But maybe not the Hulk. Carol gets to her feet and leaves the room. And shit, shit. She's starting to cry. Did he fuck up? 

Bruce and Sam exchange a look. "I'll go," Sam says. 

Bruce pauses the show while Sam walks out of the room. 

“You know Carol likes women, right?” Valkyrie asks. 

“What?” Peter buries his face in his hands for a moment and then looks up. “Oh my god, no, I didn’t know that. I mean, she’s old and everything and like, I don’t know. She used to be in the army and then she was all weird and…”

“Peter,” Bruce says again. “Stop. Talking. Get your things. You ever eaten Ethiopian food? There’s a place near the subway.” 

He shoves his things back into his bag and says “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to--” 

“It’s fine.” Bruce sounds tired. “C’mon. You too?” 

Valkyrie shakes her head. “No. Earth politics are dull, and there’s always those little animals who do tricks.” She picks up the remote and taps the buttons carefully, bringing up youtube and and a dog agility show Tony had programmed in for her. Peter veers toward the TV and Bruce puts a hand back on his shoulder. “Nope.”

There’s the sound of quiet talking from behind Carol’s door and something that sounds almost like a sob and almost like laughter. 

When they’re settled and Bruce has ordered, he says, “First off. Stop calling Carol old. She’s only about 60.”

“But that’s not young! She’s older than Aunt May.”

“She probably is.” A server puts down plates of injera and curry. Bruce tears off some bread and Peter copies him, poking curiously at the food. “You know that wasn’t easy, being queer in the 70s, right? Or the 80s?”

Peter shakes his head. “I mean, yeah. We studied it in school when we did Rent.” Bruce looked pained at that but okay. 

“Anyway,” Bruce said, “Go easy on her. She hasn’t been on Earth in a long time. It’s a bit of a shock, coming back here. Things changed a lot.”

Peter nodded. “I’m uh. I’m really sorry.”

“Tell her that, tomorrow or next time you come over to the Tower.” 

“Friday,” Peter said. “Mr Stark says that I can use his labs again, to work on making some adjustments to my web shooters.” 

Bruce nods and eats, tearing off pieces of injera and eventually, he goes up and pays for the meal. It’s cold outside, wind blowing hard down the street. Peter shivvers and does his jacket up. When it’s cold like this, with the wind, he finds himself remembering Titan and right now, he’s not thinking about that so hard. 

Bruce walks him to the subway, quizzing him about the web shooters. “It’s okay,” he says as Peter starts to head down the steps. “I’ll talk to Carol.”

“Uhm. Thanks, Mr Banner.”

Peter patrols when he’s back in Queens, staying out later than he should and then he still has the AP Physics to get through for the morning and eventually he falls asleep at his desk. 

He repeats this on Wednesday and Thursday nights and on Friday morning he wakes up to Aunt May giving him a gentle shake, photocopied pages from the newspaper tone assignment he’s working on gued to one cheek with drool. He shakes it off and looks at her blearily. 

“You slept through your alarm”, she says. 

Peter grabs his phone and stares at it and yeah, it’s 8:04am. “Oh my god I’m late,” he howls, scrambling to his feet and falling over again, because his legs are numb after a night in the chair. 

“I called your school,” Aunt May says. “I claimed you’ve got a doctor’s appointment and you’ll be in at lunch.” And then, “Go to bed, Peter.”

He can’t sleep, though, so he settles for AP Spanish revision.

Aunt May gives him a hug when he leaves and says “You can talk to me, Peter. You know that, right?” 

He imagines what it would have looked like when Thanos. When Thanos… and then he forces that thought away because Aunt May is here. They won. He’s here because they won. “Love you, Aunt May,” Peter says and books it down the road on his bike before she can respond. 

Peter goes to Stark Tower after school. Works in the lab. Avoids Carol, because he’s not really sure how to talk to the woman who saved the world any more. 

He almost gets out free and clear only she comes down to the lab. Picks up his half assembled web shooter and looks at it critically. “Good work there.”

“Nrrgh,” says Peter and then “Thanks. Um. I’m using a derivative of Mr Stark’s nano materials and um. It’s heavier than carbon fiber but the stress testing says that it’s stronger and I put a lot of force onto these, so they’re probably a good option.”

She nods. Asks some questions, helps with the welding because, really, he’s more a theory guy. “I didn’t know you could weld.”

Carol shrugs. “You think test pilots only fly planes?”

Well, yes, but no, apparently that’s not the answer. “No, I know you do uh. Army things. Like, marching and drills and …” Peter trails off because he has no idea what Army people do the rest of the time. 

“I was Air Force,” Carol says. 

“Oh. Uh.” She punches him in the shoulder. He pretends like it doesn’t hurt.

 

And then three armed robbers with Chitauri tech attack New York on and off for three weeks during finals and Peter doesn’t sleep much for weeks which is fine, because falling asleep feels like being on Titan and he has robbers to find.

He's finally figured out where they're going to hit next and leaves his physics final assignment unfinished, climbing out the window at midnight to go and stand outside a jewelry shop on the Upper West Side. 

His phone buzzes and there’s a text from Aunt May. “Please, Peter. You can talk to me. If this is a Spiderman thing, I’ll help you figure it out. Please come home. It’s late. I love you.” He looks at his phone in horror - she knew? She knew? And … there were the guys he was trying to stop, blue glowing Chitauri exoskeletons wired to their bodies.

Peter shoved his phone away and focussed.

"C'mon, guys," Peter says. "You don't want to do this." He's tired and his head hurts and Aunt May is going to flip if he's not home by 6am and he's got a history exam in like ten hours and "C'mon. Leave it alone."

The men don't argue. They shoot him instead, blue energy cracking around the Chitauri weapons. The blast sends him flying down the street. 

Peter gets to his feet and his ears are ringing and he's disoriented. They shoot him again and then they drop a building on him.

When he wakes up, he's pinned and his mask is caked with blood and dust and it's hard to breathe so he scrapes it off by rubbing hsi face against rubble and tries to move but he can't.

He passes out again. Wakes up to voices talking indistinctly. There's a glowing blue dot in front of his eyes with a Stark Industries logo on it and he’s still pinned.

Next time he wakes up, he’s somewhere soft. “Don’t move,” says Aunt May, and he doesn’t. He tries to talk to her and he can’t and he panics and there’s a lot of beeping and nurses and eventually they all make him understand that he’s in a hospital and he’s got some kind of ventilator tube down his throat. He’s on a lot of medication and that’s why he can’t talk and also why he can’t move and the world goes away again.

Peter wakes up again. Aunt May is asleep and snoring but he’s able to sit up. There’s movement across the room and Carol smiles at him. “You’re awake,” she says.

“Uh, I guess?”

Carol laughs, softly. “This is one of Tony’s clinics. All of the staff have SHIELD clearance. You don’t need to worry about anything.”

“I hadn’t, Ms Danvers.”

“Good. You’re a lot more intact than I was expecting, given that a building was dropped on you two days ago. You must heal fast. I owe Steve twenty - I didn’t think you’d recover this fast.”

“Um.” Peter rubs a hand through his hair. It felt gritty with dust and sweat. He stank. 

“What happened?” Carol asks.

“There were these guys. They’ve hooked themselves into these exosuits made from Chitari rubbish and they were robbing banks and jewellers and someone had to…”

Carol held up a hand. “You spend three afternoons a week in a tower full of super powered people. You didn’t have to go it alone. We’ll help you take them down.”

“But Tony… Mr Stark said… Before. He said -”

“I don’t care what Tony said. He’s an asshole.”

“Um.” The room swims and Peter closes his eyes and breathes. 

“You okay?”

No. “Yeah. I’m uh. I’m fine.”

“Your Aunt May was worried about you.”

“I’ve been lying to her,” Peter whispered. 

“Talk to her.” Carol sighed. “You need to talk to her or this --” she waved a hand around the room, “is going to get in the way of everything.”

“How do you…”

Carol looked tired. “My ex wife Maria and I - I was on and off the planet with the Skrulls for a couple of years and we never talked about it and the space between us got bigger and bigger until we didn’t work any more.” 

“You were married?” Peter asked, stunned.

“Not legally, but yeah. She’d talk about us doing it right one day, for our daughter.”

“You had a daughter?”

Carol nodded. “Monica was … amazing. Is amazing. Best damn kid you could have.” She smiled and sighed. “Your Aunt and I were chatting while you were out. Bruce was, too.”

“We were.” He turned to look at Aunt May. “Carol said you had a rough time.”

The wind had been blowing through the silence that was left when Thanos walked away through a hole in the universe back to Earth and they’d failed. They’d failed. 

And they’d stared at each other and it had been too big and too terrible to understand and then he’d drifted away and it was like falling and dissolving and pain and nothing all at once and then he’d woken up again and the world was reset and no one except for the people who had gone out there to Nowhere remembered. They’d come back on a Skrull ship. 

And Aunt May had died. And she was back again but she had died. She had died.

Peter begins to cry. “You know that I’m Spiderman?” he asked. 

“Of course. You’re not that good at secrets.”

“A thing happened. A Spiderman thing. No one remembers it but we were on a field trip and..” He hardly heard Carol leaving the room.


End file.
